Not quite Goldilocks and the Three Bears, I’ll grant you, but when looking at the Drawing Room carpet, we do sometimes wonder ‘who’s been eating our lovely Georgian carpet?’ Of course, the main culprit is going to be one of these (look away now if the sight of creepy crawly things unnerves you): Continue reading →

While condition checking and cleaning one of the lacquer cabinets in Mrs Child’s Dressing

The Lacquer cabinet in Mrs. Child’s Dressing Room at Osterley Park.

Room, a couple of unwelcome visitors were discovered in a bottom drawer. A few woolly bears (no longer alive) were found amid a pile of suspicious looking fragments. The base of the lacquer drawer was also patterned with golden blooms that may have been a result of previous mould damage, or some sort of damage to the wood layer underneath the resin layers. All the other drawers and the shell of the cabinet were in great condition, so the discovery of the problematic drawer was completely unexpected and poses some interesting questions. Could the drawer have contained something which attracted the pests and caused the damage to the surface? Could this explain where the dust fragments we found came from? Continue reading →